


No Heroes Allowed

by alpha_hydra



Series: When Our Wounds Will Fade to Black [3]
Category: Batman (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 09:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8138285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpha_hydra/pseuds/alpha_hydra
Summary: Cassandra Cain has only ever known the bitter taste of death and the heft of a knife. There is no happiness, no warmth, no language for her; there is only one word: kill.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd because I am trash. Before I vanish off the face of the earth for a while again, can I just say? I got the idea for this fic THREE YEARS AGO when I wrote the chapter in The Other Thing. And finally! It's out in the world!

Cassandra Cain is five years old and lives in silence. She does not have language for the first long years of her life, nor does she know a moment of kindness from the people who teach her. Not until she can hold a knife in her hands does she leave the darkness where she was kept. Then, she has only one word whose meaning she painstakingly deciphers from the clues the woman with long fingernails and inky black hair throws her way.

“Kill,” the woman says, standing over the crouched body of a frail old man. Cassandra has two knives in her hands, and she is seven when she finally understands and slides her knife along thin, fragile skin. 

“Kill,” a tall man whispers a year later, and from high up along the tops of the canopy, she spots the stumbling form of a young man winding down the mountainside. She knows now that the slip of his bootsole along the rocky surface means that he is hurrying, the stiff set of his shoulders and the ragged sound of his breathing, echoing in the dark, mean that he is afraid. Cassandra slips down the side of the tree like a shadow, and her victim doesn’t even notice her approach until her knife is stuck between his ribs and he looks down at her with wide, shocked eyes.

_Kill_ , these two people say, the only two people who have ever spoken to her, and so she does; she hones this skill until she is twelve and has perfected all the methods of killing a human that is much larger than herself, can duel wield steel blades almost as cold as the moonlight, and has only ever known the darkness as her friend. 

Until one day, she is led into a small room with red sunlight pouring in from every direction, and she is almost blinded by the light when she sees a small boy in there, with a woman’s hand on his shoulder.

“Protect,” the man who taught her how to be a weapon says, and Cassandra doesn’t understand at first, but he pushes her forward and says again “Protect. Do not kill.” 

They leave her with this small boy and when the sun disappears Cassandra feels on better footing. The boy is smaller than her, but he sits cross-legged only ten feet away, and he is not afraid.

“What’s your name, then?” he says, but these are just sounds to Cassandra, and he seems frustrated and angry when he makes more sounds at her, but he does not leave.

Cassandra does not see the man or woman again, even though she thinks she should. She would have liked for one of them to touch her, to lay a hand on her shoulder the way this boy’s—woman? There should be a name—had when she first saw them.

“Damian,” he says the next day, when the sun is out and they are still alone. “That’s my name.”

Cassandra does not know what that means at first, but after hours—so long that the sun has gone through most of its journey across the sky, Cassandra thinks she understands. _Damian_.

*

The next day, there is the woman from before, she slips in quietly from a wall that should not be a door, and Cassandra tracks her movement, imagines all the ways this woman’s life could end. 

“Mother!” Damian says when he spots her, almost thirty seconds later, and he rushes to her and wraps his arms around her legs. 

The woman, to Cassandra’s surprise, kneels and holds him close. Cassandra has a violently painful reaction to that, worse than the time her fingers were broken for being detected before she could make a kill. She wonders if someone has managed to sneak up on her, but the feeling dulls to an ache when Damian takes the woman’s hand and leads her outside, saying incomprehensible words to this woman who actually _laughs_. 

It is many, many hours before the woman leaves and Damian sits again beside her. 

“She is my mother,” Damian says, and there is something in his eyes that is fragile when he says it. The jiggle of his knee says that he would rather not be sitting, and the tiny twitch in his thumb tells her he is not feeling pity, but it is something close. “Do you know what that means? Mother?”

Cassandra looks at him, because she is very close to understanding this boy, but it’s like there is a wall between her and the words. He is asking her something, but she does not know. How does one respond to something if not to obey? There is no question in her vocabulary. There is only killing.

Which is not all true anymore. There is _Protect_. There is _Damian_.

Damian stares at her for so long that the shadows around them almost swallow him whole. 

“I’m going to bed,” he says at last, and wanders away to his sleeping area.

Cassandra, not for the first time, wishes she knew what his sounds meant.

*

They come three nights later. Cassandra hears a guard of people moving close-to-silently through the trees some twenty yards south of them, and she has her knives drawn seconds later. Eventually, she spots one darting from shadow to shadow. She thinks they would be invisible to most everyone else, but even after getting accustomed to sunlight, Cassandra will always be a creature of the shadows. She knows them better than anyone in the world. 

For the first time in her life, Cassandra does not attack her target. She stays perfectly still, thinks about killing and protecting, then creeps into Damian’s room. He is tossing and turning and looking very, very fragile when she reaches out to him. Her hand hovers over his sleeping form, and she thinks of all the different ways she can kill him before she puts her hand on his shoulder and shakes him awake.

“What is it?” he asks, voice still groggy with sleep. 

Still mostly asleep until the silence stretches between them and he finally sits up. His eyes are sharp now, flashing with a dangerous sort of intent that Cassandra recognizes well.

“What is it?” he asks again, more alert. 

Cassandra holds out her knife, blade pointing down, and waits. Damian doesn’t miss a beat, just takes it from her hands and looks to the doorway. Cassandra cocks her head one way then another, searching for sound. She finally hears it in the slow grind of a misplaced roof tile. She turns to Damian, then sprints outside to climb up a smooth alabaster pillar. She does not even know if Damian’s followed her until she is fighting off four men dressed in black and she hears his voice from the other side of the roof.

“You think you can kill me? Do you know who I am?” 

“You’re a kid who doesn’t deserve the blood that runs through your veins!” one of the men says. Cassandra imbeds her other knife deep in his back as he says it.

“I am heir to the Dragon’s head!” Damian says, sounding much older than normal. “And that means the league of assassins will be mine!”

“The league of assassins belongs to The Light!”

It turns out there are five in total, and they are all dead before morning. 

“We should leave,” Damian says, after. “Mother won’t be pleased that her safe house was discovered.”

Cassandra resumes her seat in the large room with large windows, and she does not see Damian again until the sun is at its highest point in the sky. He returns with a heavy-looking bag slung over his shoulder and another dragging along behind him. 

“Come on,” he says, dropping the first bag at her feet. 

Cassandra looks inside; in it are several pouches with water sloshing inside them and enough food for several days, a week maybe if she goes hungry. Cassandra does not understand, and watches Damian walk away only until he has crested the hill not thirty feet from their makeshift dwelling. Then, she picks up the bag and rushes after him. 

They walk for nine days and run out of food on the sixth. Damian shows her how to make traps for small animals, and Cassandra shows him how to slice the feet off where the ankle bones join the tibia to make it easier to skin them. 

On the ninth day, the woman finds them, and she takes them somewhere much colder. There is a small, wooden house somewhere up a mountaintop, and it is snowing lightly when they arrive. At least the snow will make it easy to spot targets.   
“Stay safe, Damian,” the woman says, and holds him again. “Your grandfather may be in trouble. I have to find him.”

“Grandfather always escapes,” Damian says. Cassandra scans the mountainside so she doesn’t have to watch them. “It’s what he does.”

“Maybe not this time. Stay out of trouble.”

She stops beside Cassandra before she disappears, watches her with eyes that say she is weighing her options. She shifts her weight, and it tells Cassandra she’s made up her mind seconds before the woman pulls a small pouch from one of her pockets. 

“For emergencies,” she says, and is gone moments later.

When Cassandra opens the bag, she finds a vial of thick, purple liquid within. She uncorks it, and the smell of it is sweet, almost overripe. She stoppers the vial and wonders why the woman would give her poisons. 

*

They live out the bitter winter months in this small house, and there is very little for them to do while they wait for the snow to melt away. 

One day, when Cassandra watching the dark clouds from their foggy window, Damian says, “You know what Kill means,” and she turns to watch as he paces the length of the room.

She thinks he’s grown in the months since they’ve met; soon he will be as tall as her.

“Right?” he says. “Kill. You know what it means.”

Cassandra says nothing. Damian moves his hands in a strangely specific way then; he points somewhere, and gestures downward with the hand. The index finger of his right hand sweeps under the outstretched palm of his other hand.

“Kill,” he says again, repeating the hand gesture, and again, “Kill,” when she doesn’t move.

There is something in his eyes that Cassandra cannot name, so she curls her right hand into a fist and outstretches her index finger to mirror Damian’s. He smiles, nods, and when he says “Kill,” she holds her other hand out, palm down, and raps her knuckles against the fleshy part of her palm.

“Close enough,” Damian says, and that’s how it starts. 

*

It’s like a dam is broken after that. He teaches her “yes” and “no” and “go away,” and slowly his sounds become words become hand gestures that she can give him. She learns Mother and Father and family (is disappointed when she realizes she has none of these). Damian gives her words. 

“Do you know your name?” Damian asks one day, signing the question as he asks. 

Cassandra cocks her head and thinks for long moments, first to parse out the question then to wonder what he means. 

_I don’t know,_ she finally decides. 

“Cassandra,” he says, and finger spells the letters out for her. 

_C-A-S-S-A-N-D-R-A_ she signs back, stopping for a moment to remember what the S shape feels like.

A pause, where Damian bites his lip and looks the most unsure she’s ever seen him.

“Do you know my name?” he asks. 

The look in his eyes is something very hopeful, so Cassandra thinks for a moment then slowly spells it out for him.

_D-A-M-I-A-N_ , and the smile he sends her is small and shy, the first one she’s seen on him since his mother left him. 

She smiles and thinks that maybe she has something of a family after all.

*

There is a night when she can feel the first exhale of winter ghost over the mountain—the time of year where there is snow still on the ground, but it has melted by noon—where she is sitting cross-legged on the porch. It is very late, and she can hear Damian asleep upstairs. She lets the silence wash over her, thinking she’ll go to sleep soon and tomorrow she can show Damian a back-handspring before it gets to cold to be outside, that she sees him again. The man is nothing more than a smear of black and red against the snow, and he meanders towards her with single-minded intent. 

Cassandra thinks of the way his breath had felt against the side of her face less than a year ago, the way his boot felt against her spine when she was not fast enough or brutal enough or silent, and something red hot boils in the pit of her stomach. And now she knows that this feeling is called anger, and that she is angry with this man who could have held her the way Damian’s mother did and instead showed her nothing but death and silence. 

She still wishes she knew his name. 

He says nothing to her, the same as always, and for a second she wonders just how extraordinary it is that Damian just began speaking with her. That he tried for so long and didn’t stop trying until he found a way to get her to answer him. But then the man is pulling out his knife and a rolled up sheet of paper, and he stabs it into one of the wooden posts to Cassandra’s right. 

“Do not protect anymore,” he says, and then under his breath adds, “Thalia Al Ghul is of no use to me anymore. Kill him.”

_Kill him_ was something Cassandra would have understood, before. And now she looks at this man whose face is empty, and feels the anger curl up again. The set of his shoulders means he is agitated and therefore will not be careful, and when he looks at her again his hand curls into a fist. 

She learned the sign for hate from Damian seven days ago, and now she wonders why she’s ever taken orders from someone who hates her. He leaves without another word, and Cassandra considers sticking his own knife in the space between his shoulder blades. Instead, she stays seated and watches him until he disappears into the darkness. 

Damian finds her sitting there at sunrise. He pulls down the roll of paper and frowns dramatically at what is written there.

“Who brought this?” he asks, but Cassandra has no idea how she could describe this man. “We have to go,” he says then, and yanks the knife out of the wall after a short struggle. “We’re not safe here.”

*  
So they walk.

*

They go down the mountain side and across a river and through three villages with thatched roofs already covered in snow, and then they begin hiking up a different mountain.

A blizzard blows over them before they can reach the summit, and so they hole up in a small cave to wait out the worst of it. She is hyper aware of the fact that they did not bring enough food to last very long, and wonders what Damian’s plan was, taking them this route. 

Days pass. They blizzard calms for a day perhaps, long enough for Cassandra to scour the mountainside for some damp, half-rotten wood before she’s forced back to their cave.

“Mother will find us,” Damian says, watching the snow with a frown on his face. “She has to. She’ll need my help if grandfather does die.”

*

Cassandra thinks it’s only a matter of time now before they either freeze to death or starve, when someone stands before the mouth of their cave, crouching and shivering. She is too tired now to have noticed, and thinks she must do better next time. She cannot leave Damian alone or worse yet, under subpar protection. 

She’s already thinking up some of the quickest ways to kill this woman should she need to when Damian stands to his full height (not all that impressive, considering he’s probably nine years old) and glares at the woman.

“My name is Damian al Ghul,” he says. “I am the heir to the League of Shadows, and I do not require your assistance. Please leave.”

Which is the beginning of the end, she thinks, and unsheathes her knife as quietly as possible. 

*  
In the end, Damian agrees to go with the woman (she calls herself Batgirl) and so Cassandra is forced to follow. Cassandra does not think this woman won’t lead them into more trouble than they already are in, but there is nothing in her life except Damian, and she won’t send him off to strange countries without her protection. So she follows. 

Everything that happens afterwards then is strictly Damian’s fault.

**Author's Note:**

> Standard Disclaimers because I can't ever not include them. I'll post the next chapter of The Other Thing eventually. It's almost done incubating.


End file.
